


Twenty-hour Days

by Bluewolf458



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Gen, Sentinel Bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-10
Updated: 2018-02-10
Packaged: 2019-03-16 08:28:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13632528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluewolf458/pseuds/Bluewolf458
Summary: Basically... Blair's workload





	Twenty-hour Days

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2018 Sentinel Bingo prompt 'morning person'

Twenty-hour Days

by Bluewolf

Blair was more of a morning person than most people realized. He woke early, checked the time, then as often as not rolled over and went to sleep again; but if he needed to get up early, he did, as soon as he woke. He wasn't averse to getting more time with his eyes closed, but it was a long time since he needed more than four hours a night. His second sleep was roughly two hours. Nice to have, though he didn't actually need it.

During his first days in the loft, he got up early to wash first then get out of Jim's way; and while Jim was getting washed Blair made breakfast. He wasn't buying Jim's favor, just regarding it as a way of repaying Jim for his hospitality - especially after he returned Larry to the lab, and Jim told him he was welcome to stay a few weeks longer while he looked for somewhere rather more salubrious than the warehouse.

"You're not going back to live in a rat-infested derelict building!" he said - and Blair had no wish to argue with that.

He had looked for another apartment - he had even found one or two possibilities - but Jim, after one look around either the area or the apartment itself, had vetoed them all, for various reasons. In one case he had called the building 'a fire hazard' - and a few days later there had been a newspaper report of a fire in the building in question, around 6am. Certainly at the time the fire had been called in, Blair would have been awake - his first wakening of the morning - and getting up, but he would undoubtedly have lost some, if not all, of his possessions - the occupants who were awake had barely managed to get out, and the fire department, after the fire was extinguished, found the bodies of four residents still in what was left of their beds - as well as three who had been awake and tried to escape, but had been overcome by smoke or flames, unable to get to an exit.

As he read the report, Blair glanced up at Jim. "Thanks," he muttered. "I'd have been awake - probably in the middle of getting washed - but from the sound of it nobody who was awake had time to do more than get out. OK, I have an external drive that has my laptop backup on it - I back everything up every time I add something new to any folder, and that lives in my office at Rainier. But replacing the laptop... "

Jim frowned slightly. "You'd have been awake and getting washed... "

"About when I get up here, a lot of the time," Blair pointed out.

"A lot of mornings, yes - but there have been some mornings I've had to haul you out of bed between seven and eight."

Blair chuckled. "Time to come clean, I suppose. I'm awake about six every morning, and what I do then depends on my schedule for the day. If I've nothing lined up for early, I just go back to sleep for a couple of hours - and I've sometimes found that having a reputation as someone who's reluctant to get up in the morning can be useful. It can make some people underestimate you, think you're nothing but a lazy idiot."

"But I've heard you still awake and working well after midnight."

"Four hours a night is all I need a lot of the time. Once or twice a year, if I'm on holiday and the weather is really bad, I'll stay in bed snoozing all day, almost as if I'm banking sleep. I suspect that if I never had to give early morning lectures, that if my first lectures were never earlier than - say - ten, I might adjust to getting up at seven every morning - even here; you tend to go in to the PD for eight except when Simon calls you in early. I can get up about seven, be washed and dressed and have breakfast - as long as it's an alga shake that I can swallow in two or three minutes - in time to go out with you at twenty to eight, though I have to admit that a more substantial breakfast takes longer."

Jim grinned. "I have to admit, Chief, you never fail to surprise me. I don't think I know anyone else who considers a 20-hour day, pretty well seven days a week, feasible."

"Looked in the mirror recently, Jim?"

And Jim's grin widened.


End file.
